Babies could be predisposed to dance

New research has revealed that babies will move to music, suggesting that we have may be born with a predisposition to dance.

A new paper has revealed that children as young as five months engage in "significantly more rhythmic movement to music and other rhythmically regular sounds than to speech."

Researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of York teamed up with the University of Jyvaskyla for the project that saw 120 infants studied.

Dr Marcel Zentner and Dr Tuomas Eerola led the project and explain: "Humans have a unique ability to coordinate their motor movements to an external auditory stimulus, as in music-induced foot tapping or dancing. This behaviour currently engages the attention of scholars across a number of disciplines. However, very little is known about its earliest manifestations. The aim of the current research was to examine whether preverbal infants engage in rhythmic behaviour to music."

Previous experiments have revealed the ability to "entrain" or respond to a beat in children aged four and above, but the team claim to be the first to have studied babies.

The children, who were aged between 5 and 24 months, were split into two different groups. Both groups were played classical music, rhythm-only excerpts of the same tracks, a children's song, isochronous (or regularly spaced) drumbeats and a musical piece with rapid tempo shifts. As a control, one group was played adult-directed speech (namely speech aimed at adults) while the other was played infant-directed speech.

All the while, the children were held by one of their parents who was asked to wear headphones through which they heard spoken text so that they could not influence their child's movements.

The babies' movements were captured using a digital video camera, and the footage was analysed by two independent observers as well as using 3D motion capture technology. The observers were told to look for occurrences of rhythmic movements defined as "a movement of parts of the body or the whole body that was repeated in the same form at least three times at regular short intervals."

The results revealed that the babies moved far more rhythmically to the music and "other metrically regular stimuli" than to the voice recordings. However, the team did find that the youngest children in Group 2 (aged 5 to 7 months), moved as much to infant-directed speech as to music.

The team next brought in ballet dancers from the Geneva Opera to analyse whether the babies were co-ordinating their movements with the music, and also noted how much they smiled as they moved. Not only did the team find that the babies did move with the beat, they also smiled more as their attempts became more successful. "This association raises the possibility that surges in positive affect may facilitate, and perhaps even motivate, rhythmic engagement with metrically regular sound patterns."

However, the team says that a big question remains: Do we have a brain mechanism present from birth for coordinating movement to music?

"It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition," they write. "One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing."